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The irony is that the biggest seasonal forecast busts often provide the biggest insights about the nature of hurricanes and the environments in which they flourish.

"Last year's season will end up being a tremendous learning opportunity, and a lot of research is underway to track down signals that should have been accounted for but were unknown at the time," said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane scientist at the University of Miami.

A pioneer in the field of forecasting hurricanes, Gray, now 84, has students in prominent forecasting positions around the country.

One of them, Chris Landsea, chief science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center, agreed that losing the forecasts would be unfortunate.

"If indeed Drs. Gray and Klotzbach stop their seasonal hurricane forecasting efforts, this would be a sad end of an era," Landsea said. "While these forecasts are not perfect, these investigations and real-time predictions have taught us quite a bit about the behavior of hurricanes on year-to-year and decade time scales."

Gray has subsidized the Colorado State forecasts for a decade, spending about $500,000 of his own money, Klotzbach said.

Insurance companies have paid for most of the costs, which come to about $150,000 annually for Klotzbach, an assistant, research and travel costs.

However, after their largest insurance backer fell through for 2014, Klotzbach has been scrambling.

"There are lots and lots of irons in the fire, but we don't have what we need yet," he said. The funds need to be raised by late February or March.

Learn from mistakes

In the meantime, Klotzbach said, scientists are working to understand how last year they could have been so wrong. And while hurricane scientists have heard the criticism that comes with bumbling a forecast like this, it has not deterred them.

"There are certainly folks who are anti-seasonal forecasting, claiming that it has no skill and no practical application," McNoldy said. "Well, historically, it does have skill. Seasonal forecasters are quite aware of its limitations and issues, much more so than the people criticizing it. They cannot predict individual storms or landfalls, and don't claim to."

For now the seasonal forecasts are probably of most value to the scientific community. Gray, Klotzbach and a growing number of seasonal forecasters study spring- and summer-time conditions to determine whether they correlate with observed hurricane activity.

Some do, some don't.

For the 2013 season, forecasters predicted that sea surface temperatures would be warm, and that atmospheric conditions would favor lots of tropical storms and hurricanes. The seas were warm, and most atmospheric conditions were favorable.

So what happened? Scientists don't know for sure, but clearly there are other meteorological variables they need to understand to better grasp hurricane formation and intensification.

"Every forecast group performed poorly in 2013, so something new will be learned as a result," McNoldy said.

Value of the research

So why publish the forecasts for public consumption?

According to Bill Read, a former director of the National Hurricane Center and now a hurricane consultant for KPRC, the main value to the general public of seasonal forecasts is human interest.

"People find the subject intriguing and always ask 'How many are we going to have?'" Read said.

The problem Read says he has with seasonal forecasts is that people will sometimes equate their own risk to the number of storms in a forecast. If there are few storms, he said, people would assume they could take a year off in their preparations.

However, like McNoldy, he believes researching the viability of long-range forecasts has value.

"The past season, colossal bust notwithstanding, there has been a reasonable track record," Read said. "I actually think the research work that Klotzbach and Gray and others conduct on seasonal aspects of hurricane activity is important. Through this longer range type of study we gain insight into the elements that impact seasonal activity and why."